As the software industry matures and the available computational power increases, software developers are being challenged with problems of inescapable complexity. This means that the problems which researchers are attempting to confront in software are of such complexity that it is difficult--if not impossible--for an individual developer to comprehend all of the subtleties of a particular design. In some cases, the complexity of such systems exceeds the human intellectual capacity.
Consider the requirements of a software system which must manage the development and manufacturing process of a multi-engine commercial aircraft; or the fabrication of a very large scale integrated (VLSI) microprocessor circuit. These problems are typical of those encountered in the management of work in a factory shop floor. As is appreciated by practitioners in the art, the management of a factory floor environment is one of the more imposing tasks facing computer scientists today. The enormity of the requirements of a factory floor software system has prompted researchers to search for alternative architectures aimed at handling and controlling the vast complexity of the tasks involved.
In the past, factory floor software systems have comprised traditionally centralized systems. The basic assumption of these prior art approaches is that all of the functional programs run on one centralized mainframe computer system. According to these architectures, the factory floor machine functions were embodied in executable subroutines. However, the main problem inherent with such architectures is that they ignore a basic fact about the factory floor environment; that is, that the factory floor is distributed in nature. Distributed in the sense that machines, resources, labor, work instructions, etc., are all physically located in different areas of the shop floor. Moreover, the task of manufacturing a product requires complex coordination of all of the objects listed above. Thus, the nature of the problem flies in the face of conventional architectural solutions. Because of the distributed nature of the factory floor environment, execution of software functions inherently created conflicts in the control of the factory floor environment in prior art systems.
As will be seen, the present invention provides an object-oriented process architecture for factor floor management software which is capable of tracking, monitoring and controlling all aspects of the factory environment--not simply the work in progress. Importantly, the architecture of the present invention is compatible with the distributed nature of the factory floor since it is itself distributed in make-up. As a result, the present invention produces a substantial savings in terms of performance and in the development of a factory floor software system. Furthermore, because the present invention is implemented in an object-oriented manner, the architecture provides the ability to model real world events and objects directly in software. Other advantages and methods of the present invention will become apparent upon a reading of the detailed discussion which follows.